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Hi, what's up Toby?

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We have made it to the Process Debt Podcast episode number eight.

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Today, we will be talking about virtuous cycles.

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Now, virtual cycles, those can be great.

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Virtual or virtuous?

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Which cycle?

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Virtuous. Let's do virtuous.

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Well, virtual cycles is on a future episode.

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How's that?

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Virtual cycles.

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The power of virtual process.

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It's like virtual currency.

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It is.

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Sounds good.

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That's how you retire young like us.

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It's a technology finding a problem.

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No, virtuous cycles.

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And one of the patterns that I've recently noticed,

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and actually as I noticed it, I was like, oh man, that happens a lot.

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Which is when I believe that knowledge work is a lot about the transfer

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of knowledge, right?

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Specifically in business processes, it's the transfer of that knowledge.

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Whereas if you're a developer, it's basically transferring.

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A lot of times it's transferring of data.

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It's slightly different.

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But there's this unvirtuous cycle, which is we deliver a deliverable.

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A lot of times those deliverables can be a PowerPoint, a Word doc, a Confluence page.

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Could be any roadmap, whatever.

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We deliver that.

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And oftentimes those send poor signals.

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Meaning there's something different in this presentation than my peer gave

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in their presentation.

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So now we're in mixed messaging.

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Yeah.

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So there's this mixed signal between the two groups because there's no

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consistency in what the deliverable is.

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And so I work in a product org.

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And so we have X amount of product people.

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And if I deliver something and then my peer delivers something and it's

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different, whoever went second or whoever has the ugliest looking presentation

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has basically sent a signal, a poor signal, a signal of poor quality.

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And that leads to kind of a, if I'm the receiver of that knowledge, I don't

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trust either that person or sometimes the entire org, right?

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Or the entire delivery process of whatever.

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And so what the unvirtuous cycle happens is what that leads to is more control.

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In the absolute purity.

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You have to lean into it and really get more actively engaged.

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Okay.

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Correct.

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But the control is misaligned.

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Yeah.

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So the control is actually aligned to fixing the signal.

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As opposed to the outcome that we were trying to move towards.

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Correct.

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Yeah.

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Love it.

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I love it.

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Which is this.

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And so then what happens is you have this change, right?

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And that's fine.

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Change happens, right?

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Yeah.

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One of the gains that we have is gradual change, right?

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Like being disciplined in how you do these changes, especially if there's

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more than one person, because if it's one person giving an analysis, you have

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no cohort to compare it to.

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But if you have a cohort to compare your deliverables to and there's one of these

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things is not like the other or everything is inconsistent, it's just rough.

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And so more control to improve the signal, which leads to rework, right?

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Or change in what's being delivered, which leads to confusion, which leads to poor

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signals, which is this just un-virtuous cycle that's just around and around and

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around.

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Yeah.

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Chris, that reminds me of, and I'm sure we've all seen the memes where it's like,

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I will perform this task for $100 an hour.

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If you ask me what I'm doing, it's 150.

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Yeah.

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If you want to weigh in on my initial design before I deliver it, it's 200.

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Yep.

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You know, it just, and so I think that little meme that we've all seen where the

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more involved the receiver of the outcome is, the higher the cost, I think that's a

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very true thing.

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And that's the human in it, right?

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What you're describing is like, if in our race to all have access to information,

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you know, all of a sudden we've eroded the base of our expert.

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Yeah.

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Because to your point about if I have two presentations and they don't match,

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my first question is, well, who's the most expert resource?

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And the reality is, is it doesn't matter.

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It's whichever one's prettier.

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It is like that.

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That sounds ridiculous.

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But if one, OK, like, tell me this, right?

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You have an expert, they have a misspelling.

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Yeah. Right.

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You have someone who's new, fresh, excited and has a pretty PowerPoint.

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That's right.

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You're going to because you're like that there's a signal mismatch, right?

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Where it's like, oh, I'm not like I'm lose like there's a trust drop or something.

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I don't know what it is, to be honest.

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But it's like when that happens, especially as the closer gets to the CEO,

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because it needs to be polished and polished and polished, the closer gets to the CEO.

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Like if the CEO sees a misspelling from an expert that's been at the company for 35 years.

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And they see something from a consultant, let's say a consultant, let's go with McKinsey for fun,

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or whoever, Boston, whoever, pick your consultant.

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But if they compare those, right, and there's a misspelling by the internal person

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versus the professional polished McKinsey stuff, they will almost always go with that professional polished look.

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It's almost human nature.

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You know, what's funny to me, Chris, is that we've talked a lot about both of us came into the work world at the at the burgeoning of the Internet, right?

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Yeah. And I think just the little Delta in our age, you guys probably had email as a foregone conclusion as you entered.

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Oh, my gosh. The funniest thing. So freshman year of college email is out. Right. Yeah.

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We are. It was literally like the most awesome thing. We would go down to the computer lab.

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Get this. We didn't have computers in our pocket. We had to. We even have computers in our room.

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I think we had a typewriter. I'm pretty sure. Anyway, this is totally dating myself.

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So go down. You would go down and people would like be staying up till four in the morning because you could send an email back and forth.

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It was hilarious. Anyway, that's it. I love that. What's funny is that I think we referred to it in the early days as democratizing information.

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Oh, yeah. Yeah. And if you make it available, then people will see it on the on the face of its merits.

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And I think instead, what we've discovered is the million ways that we can spin things to our own cause.

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And so in today's world, it's hard to discern because most of it, very few of us are experts in every topic we touch.

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So, yeah, yeah, yeah. It does take time to to really appreciate what makes an expert.

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So if you're new to the topic, everybody around you seems to know more.

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And that's that Dunning-Prigger curve. They all know just enough to be dangerous, but they don't all admit it.

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Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting.

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Like, if you go to like so I was thinking through the on virtuous cycle.

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If you look at the virtuous cycle, by contrast, right.

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What's by contrast, it starts with the grounding, right.

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Which is when I receive, you know, something that's delivered or, you know, the knowledge work piece of work, when that's received, there needs it needs to be grounding, meaning it's consistent.

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Right. So it also needs it also needs to, by definition, define like how big this is.

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Yeah. Right. And the and the area. Right. So like you kind of there needs to be some multiple things.

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There's probably more than that. But like, you know, I think of that of like that that.

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I think if let's say it's delivery is a PowerPoint, I think it should be.

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Ten pages, completely standard stock, right.

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With two pages of autonomy, you do whatever the heck you want on those two pages.

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Right. Because we as humans, if we don't have autonomy, we're going to lose our mind.

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But it but again, it starts with that grounding, which leads to a familiarity, which should be boring.

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Yeah. That context should be familiar for the majority. Right. Correct. Correct.

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And there should be that boringness, right. Should also expose the exceptions.

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Because the exceptions are what the receiver should care about.

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And then those exceptions should should lead you to the identifiable root cause,

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which should lead to a solution, which leads to trust, right, which is kind of that that virtual cycle.

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So those are just that's my musings of the day.

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Chris, it makes me it makes me wonder generationally, you know, and then and then depending on the kind of expertise that you've developed,

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what is true can be a lot harder to discover.

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And so it does make me wonder if a significant number of leaders have simply have simply failed to keep pace with how they identify what's true.

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No, you know, if if the two power points feel like they carry equal merit,

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I don't know if that's the byproduct of not understanding the nature of data manipulation or if it's that everybody is maybe so transient now that there's few experts.

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Yeah, what's what's interesting is I've thought about the QPR process.

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Yeah. Of like if you were if you were, you know, if I was to do some consulting on that QPR process,

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I would literally create a Microsoft form, a job form.

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I don't care what form it is. Yeah. Where it's literally prescriptive.

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Fill out the stupid thing. Yeah. It's a status report.

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Correct. Fill out fill out the thing. Yeah. Right.

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Then give it to your design team to make the power points and then polish them.

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Yeah. Right. Like that would be a very, very efficient and like elegant workflow.

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And then what you could do, right, since you've got this all in a form, you basically say we're going to change one thing per quarter.

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So you add, subtract. The other thing is you've got it in a form.

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So if you want to say what the people said before.

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You could just go back and check it right like like you could say, hey, look, you know, Joe, what?

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Yeah. Wait a second.

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Last time you said it was going to be this. What happened?

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What I what I love about that and suggesting listeners take one more lap here,

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because what I like about that idea is that when we create a history and when we maintain some consistency,

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we can see the anomalies. Yeah.

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And we can kind of backtrack to see what the prior information was. Yeah.

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And I think that's how we develop a collective IQ.

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You know, we have to be able to reference and recontextualize new decision.

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Every time we try to radically transform, you know, and and unlock synergies and all the buzzword being that I think doesn't really mean anything anymore,

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because nobody knows what it means or how it's used.

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All we've done is it's it's like this word vomit. So, yeah, of course, we need more meetings and we need more power points.

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Can you craft two more memos and give me a tick tock dance on that?

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Well, and you and I worked on that cash flow calculator. Yeah.

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That was just it just basically like, look, here's your scenarios, right.

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It locks down. Right. You could go and basically say, look, this is what I predicted.

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And then how well do you predict? Right.

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Because I guarantee you there's three options when you do a prediction prediction.

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You're either you're either lucky or wrong. Right.

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Lucky being right and wrong being you, you are overly optimistic.

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Yeah. Or you're you're under you're pessimistic. Yeah. Right.

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Like there's there's no difference.

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And I think sometimes like that, there's there's no mechanism to say, what did you predict and how accurate were you?

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So anyway, we are way over.

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We have we have we have gone to the 13 minute mark.

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We are going to call it.

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Well, that's what happened. You know, Joe. So I know. I know.

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Should have been good stuff. Thank you, sir. Good stuff, man.

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What a great what a great. Yeah, what a great talk.

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We'll catch you next time, man. All right.

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Snake. All right. Yeah. All right. Bye.